Re: opinion and statements

In a message dated 6/22/01 7:16:24 PM, claudio.soboll@GMX.DE writes:

<< alas, exactly this lack is responsible for misunderstandings and
wrangles and verbal fights again and again.
look at your next verbal discussion and you will notice it.
add an "for me" explicitely to your utterances and no one can harm you
verbally.
thats just an workaround. for an ideal language the distinction
between both is important as separate introducing verbs.as well as the
distinction between
evidences. they should be head-markers because they are
1. concern the content of the whole sentence,
2. are neccesary to percept the sentence right. >>

    Per usual, I have several problems with this.  First of all, your opinion
that there are such things as true statements is just that: an opinion.  I'm
of the opinion that there's no such thing as an absolute true statement
because we're human.  After all, we have two eyes, the average of which is
what we perceive as "vision", and then we interpret what we see.
    Take the concept of lying.  In order for their to be a lie, there are
three important factors.  In order of decreasing importance, they are:
    1.) The speaker believes the statement s/he speaks to be false.
    2.) The speaker intends to deceive the listener.
    3.) The fact is actually false.
    So, as you can see, the absolute least important part of a lie is whether
or not the thing your'e talking about is "true" or "false".  An example:  Say
there's a pot in the backyard of a house.  A child who has just gotten a
brand new dog sees the dog run towards the pot and then hears it break, but
DOESN'T see it break.  Naturally, the child assumes the dog broke the pot.
The father of this child doesn't like the dog and has been looking for any
excuse in the book to get rid of the dog.  So, when the father comes home and
sees the pot broken, he turns to his child and asks, "Who did this?"  The
child, as innocently as possible said, "The neighbor broke it."
    Now, what actually happened was that the next door neighbor has two
children who are in their early teens.  They were playing catch in the
backyard.  One of them through the ball too hard and it went over the fence,
so the other jumped over the fence to get it.  The dog ran towards this teen
when he saw him, and the teen fell onto the side of the pot and broke it.  He
quickly got up, got the ball and hopped the fence, so that by the time the
child ran out, all he saw was the broken pot, and his dog's feet in soil.
    So, did this child lie?  The answer, of course, is yes, because (a) he
believed what he said to be false (most importantly), and (b) he intended to
deceive his father by saying so.  Does it matter at all that the lie he
happened to create was the actual truth?  Not in the slightest.
    So, this distinction that you hope to make in an "ideal" language would
immediately be flawed, in that one can't know for certain whether or not one
is stating actual fact, or merely an opinion.  One can only tell whether or
not one believes what one says; that's it.  And of course, if one is wont to
lie rampantly for the purposes of fun (I count myself in this number), then
these "statement" markers could be greatly abused.

-David

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